MB Civic

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/26/1518254

Highlights…

SANDY CIOFFI: For the last 50 years, oil has been produced in Nigeria, and that 50 years is also the period of time during which Nigeria has been free from being a British colony. The truth is that the legacy of that colony has the same structure laid on it, in terms of the corporate life now, so that what happened is that the corporate politics intersected with the existing illegal dictatorships. And those dictatorships were just happy to sign laws that said, OK, if there’s oil under your feet, the government and the oil companies own it.

So in the last 50 years, what has happened to the people in the Niger Delta is that they have had dredging, they have had a loss of their environment that’s unprecedented in one lifetime. They have no ability to fish, to farm. But all of the oil under their feet is owned in a joint collusion relationship in these what are called venture partnerships between corporations, one of which is an American corporation, Chevron, and several others. Shell is the largest actually. And they are essentially in a relationship where the government and those oil companies own all of that oil, the revenues of which are almost never seen by the people who are suffering from the consequences of it…

SANDY CIOFFI: Well, the women in Nigeria, as you can imagine, much like in many countries that have been exploited as a one-resource economy, the women have really suffered the most. The infant mortality rate is extremely high; the life expectancy, very short; the disease level, very high. And these women have suffered. The men often go off to the city to have any income at all, and they’re left alone to care for their families.

These women came together in 2002 and decided that they had had enough, and they would paddle wooden canoes up to huge oil platforms and climb on them and actually threaten to take their shirts off, which in Africa is a very big threat, and actually scared — the oil workers said, “Well, we’ve been trained for every possible security threat, but we were never trained for hundreds of women to come in here and threaten to take their shirts off.” And it was very effective. And for the first time, something called an MOU was signed, which is a memorandum of understanding.

And those women were demanding fairly basic things, like jobs, some remediation of the environment, water, electricity, healthcare, basic infrastructure that you would expect, that if you have $38 billion annually of revenue going to your government, that you would have, and they have none of those things. In fact, they have quite the opposite. They have their livelihood taken away from them. The huge rivers of the Niger Delta used to yield fish that were just enormous. One day’s catch could feed your family for a week. Now, the fish are — and I’ve filmed this, I’ve seen it — the fish are tiny. They have almost no meat. And they’re pure poison. They’re just soaking up oil, acid rain. So these women have suffered an enormous amount.

They commandeered these oil platforms. They got the MOUs signed. Very sadly, those MOUs have mostly gone —

AMY GOODMAN: Memos of understanding.

SANDY CIOFFI: Memoranda of understanding have largely gone unfulfilled…

AMY GOODMAN: We are continuing with Sandy Cioffi, documentary filmmaker, director of a new film called Sweet Crude. I wanted to play a clip of Wole Soyinka. He is a renowned writer from Nigeria, won the Nobel Prize for Literature for his writing. He joined us in our studio in April. This is what he had to say about the situation in the Niger Delta.

WOLE SOYINKA: Well, some of these companies and the governments that they represent, in some cases, make a mistake when they think that the indigenous of the land from whom this wealth is extracted, illiterate, not knowledgeable, uninformed, this is the fundamental mistake which they make. The thing they do not — those who actually live there and whose land has been degraded, whose fishing ponds are being polluted, whose farm lands have been totally rendered useless for farming purposes, whose very air has been completely toxified by decades of gas flaring, they make a mistake when they think they do not observe the digits of profit, the statistics of profit being turned in by the companies, in other words, to the detriment of their own existence.

And so, the militancy in the oil-producing region has escalated in recent months. You must have heard of hostage-taking, and I personally, I’m in a position to tell you that I have participated in the efforts to release those hostages, which came to a successful conclusion. So I am in touch with some of these people, these young people, highly motivated. They are not thugs. They are not riffraff, as they are sometimes portrayed. They are disciplined. And they are determined to correct decades of injustice, and that’s all they’re really after. You may disagree with their methods, but believe me, nobody should underestimate the very deep motivation that impels these people…

SANDY CIOFFI: Oh, absolutely. The JTF, which means joint task force, serves as private security forces in, in essence, occupied villages. These villages are the places where pump stations are right literally in the middle of town. Gas flares right next to where people live. And the JTF is serving as security for Chevron and Shell.

I will tell you that those companies are starting to hear that — because they’re right there on the front line, they are behaving as if they know that the time might run out for their ability to produce. In fact, Shell is down 25% in their production, because of the unrest. When I was there this last two weeks, the night sky, instead of being lit by seven gas flares, was only lit by two, because that many facilities have shut down.

So, the other interesting thing to note, is that what the people are saying is that with these oil facilities shut down, the environment is actually coming back, that there is some relief from some of the acid rain. You would think that people would say, “Well, if the oil companies leave, then, well, where will we get any revenue at all?” But I’ve heard many village people say, “Just fine. Just go ahead. Leave. We would prefer to see the environment be remediated and go back to fishing and farming.”

AMY GOODMAN: And so, the responsibility of the oil companies, not only there, but they are chartered in the United States. One of the stories that we exposed in 1998 was Chevron bringing in the Nigerian military, who opened fire on protesters who were protesting yet another oil spill, and they killed two villagers, critically wounded a third, rounded up others, put them in the notorious Nigerian jails, where some were tortured. Part of charters in this country are corporate responsibility.

SANDY CIOFFI: Mm-hmm. And it seems pretty clear right now that Nigeria is a fledgling democracy. And there is an election coming. It seems clear that there has been, I think, some hope in the corporate world that we still just wouldn’t be paying attention. The Niger Delta seems to me one of those top-ten untold stories in the mass media, given the importance of the place and the potential humanitarian crisis. And the fact of the matter is that Chevron should be held responsible by US citizens to behave as a corporate player in the same way they would have to in San Francisco. And they would not be able to behave — we would hope, certainly, they would not be able to behave as a player in this way in San Francisco.

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